Washington Post website hit by cyberattack

Today’s case: The Washington Post, which found itself inadvertently sending readers to the website of the Syrian Electronic Army.

Post managing editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz issued a statement saying the paper had been hit by a massive email phishing attack a few days ago. He added:

The attack resulted in one staff writer’s personal account being used to send out a Syrian Electronic Army message. This morning, some articles on our website were redirected to the Syrian Electronic Army’s site for a period of about 30 minutes.

Apparently, the hack wasn’t actually to the Post’s website itself but to one of its partners, Outbrain, a service that recommends articles online. According to E Hacking News, that means Time, CNN.com, and several other news sites could also be affected.

The Post’s website troubles came a day after The New York Times website was down for about two hours. The outage was not the result of an attack from the Syrian Electronic Army or anyone else, according to the Times. It was an “internal issue.” Advertising Age reported that the paper blamed the outage on a routine maintenance update.